Counter-Strike 2 players who were banned for using AMD’s Anti-Lag+ technology can breathe a sigh of relief as Valve begins reversing its VAC bans. Players of Valve’s latest installment of the popular franchise have been reporting for weeks about getting banned when using AMD’s newest version of its Anti-Lag technology, which is meant to reduce latency when gaming. It was also reported that Anti-Lag+ had similar problems in other games as well causing AMD to roll out its Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.10.2 driver to disable the feature in all games until it can be fixed. Valve has now released its own update for Counter-Strike 2 that has added a new check for incompatible Radeon drivers while it begins reversing VAC bans related to Anti-Lag+.
Counter-Stike 2 October 19 Release Notes (per updates page)
- Added a startup check for incompatible AMD graphics drivers. We will now begin reversing VAC bans for affected players
- Fixed a bug in Windows 11 Auto HDR that led to smoke intermittently disappearing
- Miscellaneous bug fixes
As Valve begins reversing its VAC bans this set of circumstances brings to light a complication for which GPU manufacturers have to plan ahead when implementing such technologies. Anti-Lag+ provides a feature that is highly sought after by FPS and competitive gamers by reducing latency and in turn, increasing the responsiveness of a game. NVIDIA has a similar feature called NVIDIA Reflex which has not caused these issues found with Anti-Lag+. The problem that arose with AMD’s solution is that it is provided at a driver level, existing outside of the game code, while NVIDIA has worked with developers to incorporate Reflex inside the game code (aka in the pipeline). AMD has said that it is working with developers to find a solution and it’s possible that AMD could follow a similar path as NVIDIA.